


Nothing Burns Like The Cold

by in_fini



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dubious Consent, Mind Control, Slavery, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 14:11:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/in_fini/pseuds/in_fini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU - Pitch hits Jack with an arrow and and makes him part of his family. Now they're no longer alone. Now they can be believed in... together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> May contain dubcon/noncon in later chapters. Does contain descriptions of mind control, pain, death and horrible angst. Work in progress.

He threw Baby Tooth – he would’ve been great at baseball if baseball had been invented when Pitch was alive – and Jack ran after her and leapt, arms outstretched to catch her. But his magic was gone and he hit the ground again, bare feet slipping against the ground at completely the wrong angle to keep him upright – he was so unused to gravity working normally on him, and he slid onto his knees, reaching out helplessly as Baby Tooth’s tiny bright flash of color slid into a deep crevasse.

He turned and stood, swift on his feet. He’d got gravity now, it would hurt that much more when he slammed his fist into Pitch’s stupid face. But he looked down a wickedly sharp black arrow – this one didn’t look like the one that killed Sandy (oh god Sandy) – that arrowhead was ornately shaped midnight black sand, and this one.  This one looked like a shard of ice cut so thin he’d feel the cold before he felt it cut.

He dodged – or fell, but dodged implied he had a little more control over his body – and he heard the arrow whistle past his left eye, where it thudded into an ice shelf and shattered it.  Flakes of ice spun dizzily down past him as he carefully regained his feet.

“Missed, Pitch!”

But Pitch just smirked, and then he began to laugh. Jack raised a hand to his face, where heat had suddenly began to burn in a line across his cheekbone. He’d been wrong. The arrow had been so sharp he hadn’t felt its bite at all.

Jack’s fingers came away with black snow sticking to them. It wasn’t the fresh powdery snowflakes he brought wherever he went but instead wet, sticky ice granules, and it burned, like nothing he’d ever felt before. He was frost and ice and snow not this fire that crawled under his skin and clawed away his flesh and replaced it with soot and flames and he only realized he’d fallen, curled into a ball around the cut, when Pitch knelt down and lifted his head.

“Do you like it, Jack? I made that arrow for you, and I’m really quite glad it didn’t kill you. It will be so much sweeter this way.”

Pitch drew a gleaming obsidian dagger, so finely cut that the blade was a translucent grey, from the deep shadows that surrounded him and traced a sigil over Jack’s heart. 

Fresh flames racked his body, and this time he screamed as it devoured him, cracking and blackening his bones, shriveling his insides, turning his muscles to nothing but raw nerves singing a song of blazing pain.

Sandy hadn’t screamed, he hadn’t looked like he was in pain – Jack didn’t understand, and he wanted to ask Pitch – anyone – what was happening to him, but his vocal cords had gone the way of the rest of him, and a black haze was drawing close around his vision, and so he just looked at Pitch. Pitch chuckled in an almost fatherly tone, and brushed fingertips over Jack’s eyes.

“Hush now. We have all the time in the world.”

It was nearly winter in Antarctica, and the sun slipped behind an ice shelf, and the darkness swallowed him.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s

A whole lot

Later

Or at least that’s what it feels like

When he comes round, blinking at the snowflakes blowing at hurricane force against the velvet blackness of the night.

He feels like he was taken apart and jumbled back together inside his skin and for a second he feels like maybe they dropped a part because there’s an ache where something should be but what? And the feeling goes away and now there is just the cold and the darkness, and two gleaming golden eyes.

“So you’re finally awake, boy. How are you feeling?” He’s solicitous, fussing, long grey fingers brushing his hair, straightening his clothes, helping him sit up.

“Do you remember anything? Who you are? Who I am?” The golden eyes watch him warily, at odds with the gentle smile. He shakes his head.

“Hmm. You’re Jack Frost, my dear boy, and I am Pitch.” He does a little bow, and helps Jack stand. He looks up at Pitch, who traces a finger along his cheekbone.

“Let’s do a little cosmetic repair, shall we? I just find it so interesting that you chip and fracture.”  A cloud of blackness surrounds the tips of his long grey fingers. They touch his cheek – Jack flinches at the white flash of pain - and then pull away, dipping to travel around his throat. Pitch draws his finger away, a faint thread of shimmering black sand following it and wrapping around his wrist.

“I think you’re ready to have this back now, Jack.” Pitch offers him a wooden staff, hooked at the top, and when he touches it –

~~Jack searched the prison for any vulnerability, fingers running over smooth, unbroken, flawless ice. “Let me out!” he shouted. “Give me back!”~~

Jack feels cold wind and snow rush into and around him and he soaks in it, revels in it. He rises on an icy gust, watches snowflakes break off his skin into the breeze. He twirls the staff, feels something strange pushing through his throat –

And he’s abruptly yanked back down, stumbling at the sudden unexpected contact with the earth, the mysterious feeling in his throat gone, replaced by a constricting itch around it. He looks at Pitch, confused.

“I can’t have you wandering off now that I’ve tamed you, can I?” He laughs as Jack stares at him dumbly, and strokes his face, thumb lingering on the place where he had repaired Jack. “Now then, there are some people who are very upset with you; shall we go visit –“

A brightly colored flash zips between them and faces Jack. It’s a tiny lovely fairy, squeaking desperately, gesturing towards the pocket of his hoodie, buzzing fitfully around him as Pitch tries to snatch her out of the air. He reaches into his pocket and encounters – nothing.

“You foolish meddling twit, did you think I’d leave those with him?” Pitch reaches into a shadow, fetches a glittering gold box with an enamel cover and a familiar face inlaid on the front. Jack tilts his head to the side, wondering where he could have seen it before, because all he remembers is waking up in the dark, in the cold, and meeting golden eyes.

The fairy streaks towards the box, emitting a shrill chime of outrage. Pitch tosses it up high into the air and she follows it, a bright spot of color against the night. He calls out, “Does he look like the Jack you remember?” His fingers stroke the black thread around his wrist.

~~Jack slammed into the walls over and over, beating his fists, himself, against them. “Don’t you dare hurt her! Don’t hurt her! Don’t make me hurt her, please!”~~

Jack whips his staff around and fires an icy missile at the fairy with unerring aim. Black ice encases the fairy, leaving only her head and a fragile wing free. She falls to the ground, crushing the wing under her, and her piercing cries fill Jack’s ears. Bewildered, he walks over and picks her up, trying to understand why she calls up the same feeling of familiarity in him as the golden box, like they were important to him once. He breaks off a fragment of ice covering her shoulder. She looks at him with blue and purple eyes, now filled with tears, and turns away as Pitch catches the golden box and tucks it away into the shadow of his sleeve.

He walks over and gently plucks the sobbing fairy out of Jack’s hands. “Don’t pay attention, my boy. It’s nothing you need to worry about.” He lets her fall to the ground and takes Jack’s shoulder. Jack looks at Pitch’s hand and spots something ice blue glinting urgently in the shadows of his sleeve, something tucked away and tied to that thread around his wrist, but is shaken out of his thoughts by a gentle pull.

Pitch leads him away from the pleading cries into a shadow and says, “Come along, Jack. We have scores to settle. Well, they’re my scores, but we’re family now, aren’t we, you and I?”

~~Jack stared. “I’m going to kill you.”~~


	3. Chapter 3

“You know, I suspect this is just as new to you as it is to me,” Pitch says as he leads Jack by the hand out of a shadow. Jack likes it when he touches him.

They’re in a small bedroom with gaily painted concrete walls, a rickety bookshelf, and a desk with an ancient computer radiating a soft glow over the child sleeping on the wooden mat nearby.

“The family thing, I mean. I suspect many things are new to you right now, Jack, but I mean family in particular.” He leans over the bed, watching as the girl rolls over, her black hair falling in her face. “Come here for a moment.”

Jack comes obediently to his side. The girl is golden-brown against the pale wood grain of the mat, and she reminds him of – something. He gently brushes her hair out of her face, and she shivers.

“Now then,” Pitch says as he tilts Jack’s chin towards him. He watches Jack as a small whirling sandstorm grows in the palm of his hand and turns Jack’s face towards it. “Blow.”

Jack blows. Ice grows around the sand, but the speed at which the little storm is turning chisels it into needle-sharp shards, barely visible but for the dim light reflecting off their facets. Pitch flips his hand over, releasing the storm, and she twitches, moans, and begins to shiver violently as a dark hulking form materializes over her head.

~~He swore. He pressed his hands against the floor and concentrated, searching for a weakness, focused his will into the palms of his hands. Nothing happened.~~

Pitch pulls Jack into the shadow of her bookcase. “The dreams are mine now. You can help too. I’ll take so much better care of them and the children than the Sandman. They had more respect for Guardians back when I was in charge of things.”

They emerge behind a fir tree and watch the troop of Girl Scouts setting up their tents around a crackling fire.

“The patronizing fool thought that you could rule with love and kindness. What smarmy little brats like these-“ Pitch gestures expansively towards the chattering girls “- need is not sweetness and wonder, but a firm hand. Don’t you agree?”

Jack nods. He loves Pitch.

“Spare the rod, spoil the child. And that’s what good old Sandy never understood. Why the Man in the Moon chose him and his friends I’ll never understand.” Pitch stands over the fire thoughtfully, grinding flickering flames into darkness with his boot, and flicks his wrist. Jack stumbles towards him, saving himself from the fire with his staff.

“You could be my child, Jack. The Man in the Moon chose you, but you could be so much more than a Guardian. You could be my protégé, my legacy.” He cradles Jack’s cheek with one hand, other still tight on the thread around his wrist. A shadow passes over his face. “I had a child once. I think.”

His face hardens. “Freeze their precious little hearts, Jack. Three or four feet of snow ought to do it.”

Jack rises a couple inches tentatively, watching Pitch to avoid another tug. When there is no reaction, he leaps from branch to branch until he’s swaying eighty feet above the ground. A gentle wave of his staff starts snow falling from the sky in large powdery flakes, so densely that he can hardly see past the pine needles below him. He pushes off and floats, pleased with himself. There will be snow up to the doors of the tents when he’s done, and they’ll have so much f–

A band of fire constricts around Jack’s throat and he gasps for air – he doesn’t need it but it’s so much better to breathe – and a voice reverberates in his head. _I meant like this, Frost._

Jack sweeps his arm up and fires a bolt into the gathering clouds. The wind nearly blows him away, the roaring in his ears sounding like disapproval as he fights his way down.

~~He screamed, shouted, banged his hands raw against the unyielding ice to try to get their attention. “Watch out! There’s a blizzard! Be careful!” No one heard him.~~

The voice echoes off the sharp edges and dusty corners in Jack’s head and he winces, wanting to shut it out. That’s all over with Sandy now of course. He’s gone. I devoured him and took his dreams, and now it’s you and I, the cold and the dark, spreading fear over the globe. They’ll believe in us. We’ll be real and we won’t be alone.

Jack reaches the ground, trips, and falls into a young Girl Scout. Her eyes widen, and she looks at him for a moment before fleeing. “Miss Nguyen, there’s a boy with ghost eyes and a black slash on his face and he’s so cold…” She disappears into the blizzard, going in the wrong direction, away from the camp.

Jack reaches after her, but Pitch booms in his head again. _What’s taking you so long?_

It forces him to his knees, hands over his ears, the tears squeezing out the corners of his eyes freezing into frost over his eyelashes. He makes a guttural moan of pain, the first sound he’s made since he woke up. Then Pitch is there, fading into existence, picking him up. "I didn't mean to hurt you, Jack, I won't be so loud next time. You know what they say: while you keep someone waiting, they're reflecting on your shortcomings. Be prompt next time.”

Pitch carries him away from the panicked scouts. “You did well enough. Soon you'll be facing off against some people who didn't respect you, who turned you away - but it's alright. I'll be there to guide you. Do as I say and no one will ever hurt us again." He laughs and places his fingertips against Jack's cheek. Heat flashes out, tracing angular lines over his skin, and blissful numbness sweeps through him.

Jack closes his eyes in gratitude. He briefly wonders about the girl who ran away from him, but the heat pulses again, and his mind slides away into blank apprehension. What if next time, he doesn't do well enough for Pitch?

~~Jack huddled on the floor. “They’re going to come get me, and they’re going to put me back, and then we’ll take care of you and put you back in that miserable cave, and then we’ll find that little girl before she gets lost and then we’ll give her good dreams…”~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Life kept me from updating for awhile :( I dunno if anyone still reads RoTG fanfic but I kinda want to see where this goes so here is the next chapter!


End file.
